


Remember

by TheDuckofIndeed



Category: Ratchet & Clank
Genre: Based on Centuries by Fall Out Boy, Dr. Nefarious before he was Nefarious, Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net, Some Dr. Nefarious backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-07 01:50:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18228278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDuckofIndeed/pseuds/TheDuckofIndeed
Summary: Even dreams decay once enough time has passed.





	Remember

**Author's Note:**

> Written back in 2015, this story was inspired by the song Centuries by Fall Out Boy. I'm rather proud of the style in which I wrote this, if I do say so myself.

The bustle and the noise of Metropolis was but a symptom shared by all cities across the Solana Galaxy, an unavoidable consequence when too many people congregated in one place, each living disjointed lives without regard for any of the others that went on around them. It couldn’t be prevented, nor could it be helped, had anyone cared enough to try, and few did. A shame and a pity, said all the planets blessed with a far smaller population, but it was what it was, and it was the fate of all the city folk to learn to deal with it one way or another.

Now, out of these innumerable lives out of a population of a hundred billion and growing, we could pick at random any one of these lives and find something very different indeed, but if we chose but one that would have a greater consequence to the existences of all the rest, that would narrow our choices down drastically, and so that is exactly what we ought to do, for good stories don’t always hold up well on the mundane details of what one ate for dinner that evening or whether or not they paid their bills on time.

Of course, no matter how great an effect this person might have one day, it would be impossible to pick them out without any foresight, and you would be tempted to question why we have focused our search on one particular window too many stories up to count in an apartment complex hardly different from the rest, but if you are patient, it will be made clear to you in due time.

You see, this particular window out of a quadrillion was the bedroom window of one boy, a boy that could’ve been nine or ten, if we’re making an honest guess of it. And while his window could’ve been so easily lost amidst the rest, he certainly _felt_ as lost as his window was, if not more so.

This boy laid on his bed in the dark, the lights out despite the time being a very vague “late evening”, not to mention the waning hours of a weekend about ready to come to a close, and while it might seem odd, perhaps it wasn’t so, for he was quite focused, at first glance, on the constellations sprawled across the ceiling. The boy had thrown quite the fit indeed when his mother had failed to see the need to put them up with any real order, but his persistence had paid off, even if he would still need to fix them later once he had grown tall enough to reach them, if he even _had_ need of stars on his bedroom ceiling at all by then.

But, this boy, who shall remain nameless, for it would only be more accurate that way, was not thinking of such frivolous things right now as the one star missing from Tempess Minor, but of deeper things not often touched upon by a boy of his age. He had no better way to spend his time right now anyway, as he had need to lock himself away in here when he was certain his stepfather cared little to see him, with the same sentiments felt in return, and his mother seemed like she’d prefer to forget he existed or to pretend, at least for a time, that her only son fit a more universal definition of the world “normal”.

While he knew very well what the word “Normal” meant, he didn’t know how exactly it applied to him. He thought “normal” would be the day his mother stopped dragging him off to the doctor because his head was too big or because she felt the need for him to take another one of those tests with the ink blots that he, frankly, didn’t know how you could ever pass if your guess was different from the psychologist’s. That day came a year ago, and the fact that he was alone in the dark and contemplating a feasible plan for running away from home so he wouldn’t have to get bullied at school the next day made him certain this wasn’t normal, either.

There was nothing wrong with him, though. He may not have been normal, whatever such a subjective word meant, but there was nothing _wrong_ with him, either. There was nothing wrong with him just because his mother thought he should talk to the school counselor about why he still hadn’t made any friends, and the only reason he blurted out the answer to one of the questions in math class was because that girl in the front was too stupid to get it herself. And his mother could be furious at him all she wanted for dismantling the holoscreen, because it had just the part he needed for the sonic pulse transmitter (he would eventually have to think up a catchier name for it, of course) he was building to scare away the other kids on the playground. He could’ve fixed it. He simply chose not to.

And yet, he wondered sometimes, if he was so abnormal as everyone seemed so quick to point out, how contradictory it was for someone to be so targeted, and yet, so overlooked as he. People could point and laugh, but how many of them knew his name? How could his mother fret so much over how he might make her look in public, then ignore him once they got home?

And while he thought over all these things, he was always brought back to one thought in particular when his mind grew too tired to worry anymore, and he returned to the hopeful things children wished for in their most secret of thoughts. For this boy, as different as he was, wasn’t entirely so, for he had a wish like all other little boys, even if the specifics of his wish weren’t what most had in mind. He wished to become a scientist one day, a great one, _the_ greatest one, in fact and his name would be known across the galaxy for all the many achievements he would accomplish one day. And he knew this wish _would_ come true, too, because his intelligence was the one thing he had, the only thing he had.

He would make a name for himself, and only then would he be remembered.

Oh, yes, he believed this for so many years, until he grew up, and in case you didn’t know, but surely everyone does, it can be hard in a universe filled with so many people to not lose yourself when you have no dream to lay a path out before you. This boy, now a man, _did_ become a scientist, and he _was_ known, but not for anything good, but to the extent which we really mean when we say he wasn’t known for anything good, that is far beyond the scope of this story and need not be touched upon. For now, the meaning behind the statement was limited more to an experiment of his that threatened the university in which he worked had he not gotten it under control before any harm could befall himself, or anything _else_ that resided within a city block, for that matter.

Now, we must correct one area of misunderstanding before we go on, for if you believe this city to be the same one as when the story began, you would be mistaken, but it is an honest mistake and one that matters little when all cities share the same problems. But, if you must know, and for the sake of context, the city was Blackwater City on Planet Rilgar, the university one of the most esteemed in the galaxy, and had he not been warned countless times prior to refrain from experiments whose consequences could have such dire magnitude, he might not have been kicked out of the university and told with no little force to never come back, and it had become very easy for him to believe what he used to not believe to be normal to be, in fact, a very normal existence for him indeed, no matter how much he wished otherwise.

But, now he had no dark bedroom with improperly placed constellations to go back to, for this is only fitting for children and not a young man who spends most of his working hours, a number far greater than what is rightly healthy, in a lab coat pouring over calculations that would make most dizzy. Having nowhere fitting to go, he built a lab for himself in the swamps outside the city limits where he could work at being a scientist in peace with his newly hired butler to take care of all the things he simply was too busy to be bothered with.

Now, this is a rather good time to think back on his childhood dream for a moment, and it is at this time that we must remember that just because a dream has been forgotten, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has died, and the scientist remembered this forgotten dream every once in a while, and he certainly had time for it in the quiet isolation he had returned himself to when it seemed a normal life had once again been denied him. There was still a chance to be remembered, and for more than just the lunatic who had hid himself out in the swamps out of a shame he profusely denied feeling or having any need to feel. With his old dream for the first time in years clear to him, but without the naiveté of youth to cloud it, he spent several nights thinking up a new name for himself, considering no one ever bothered to know his real one anyway, and he labored far longer on the creation of a new race of life forms that Blackwater City wouldn’t soon forget.

For he had settled just fine into the normal existence the galaxy had picked especially for him, though that was not to say he couldn’t make them pay for all the humiliation they had caused him and every last jab at his supposedly questionable sanity. Just because his life would not be normal without such things, that didn’t mean he was powerless to do anything about it, and as he neared what would surely be the first stable variation of his new Amoeboid race, the one that would wipe the planet clean of all those who had mocked him, he paused to catch his butler in the act of passing by the lab door.

“Lawrence,” he began, a very old thought returning to him from a time so distant that it could have only been very important to still be recalled, “will I be remembered for this?”

His butler considered him from the doorway, his pensive silence broken when he replied, “I’m sure it will at least end up on the news, sir.”

“I see,” the scientist said in a low tone, and he turned back to his work with a shrug, “I guess it’s a start.”


End file.
